When You Hit 60, You Just Have To Flash

Seagate unveils quite the game changer

I had the great opportunity to work for Seagate, coming in through an acquisition, a while back. The first thing I noticed about this company was the quality of the engineers roaming the campus in Longmont.

Then, while attending a customer event, I listened to another engineer talk about how Seagate increases the capacity of the disk by using Seagate Shingled Magnetic Recording, or SMR. While another engineer, leading a team of PhDs explained a new system they developed to identify and relocate hot spots in a massive storage array, conduct predictive analysis of drives to determine its potential failure, and optimize performance of an all Seagate storage system. Really impressive. Or another time when a customer was having failures repeatedly, and engineering showed up on site to offer that the data center was too warm. Seriously dropped the temp in the data center by 2 degrees, and the failures ceased.

So, when I read the news about Seagate breaking another barrier, I wasn’t too surprised.

Seagate announced a 60TB SSD at the Flash Memory Summit last week and suggested a 100TB product could be on the horizon. Imagine what would be possible with 60TB SSDs or even 100TB SSDs? When you hit 60, you just have to flash, right?

Imagine what would be possible with 60TB SSDs or even 100TB SSDs?

Could this be a game changer for the market? Quite possibly, but as with any new emerging technology, we must wait to see the appetite the market has for such technology and the particular use cases customers end up deploying. Chris Mellor does a great job covering this topic in his article, “Seagate flashes 60TB (yes, sixty) SSD monster.” And here’s the official Seagate New Flash Drives from Seagate.